This art visualisation depicts recorded energy releases from the Earth’s lithosphere also known as earthquakes. Historical records of earthquake occurrences from 1965 to 2016 are used in this visualisation piece. The colour scale shows the variations in the magnitude of the earthquake on the Richter scale, purple represents the smaller magnitude and yellowish-green representing larger. The art piece is created by representing the dataset with a 3D scatterplot. This is made possible with Plotly on CRAN project website. The dataset is read and processed in Rstudio and values for latitude, longitude and depth is plotted on the X, Y and Z axis respectively. For improved user experience, the piece is made to be interactive. Plotly plots allow users to rotate, pan, zoom to view the data visualisation. Furthermore, it allows mouse hover to allow the user to see more details regarding that specific earthquake event. The environmental issue I would like to deliver in this art visualisation piece is to show the prevalence of earthquakes. I want to show people that earthquakes are actually very common especially if you reside in a place that is proximate to tectonic boundaries. Although minor earthquakes are not much of a threat but major one posts serious damage to human properties and death. The purpose of this art piece has two main purposes:
(1) Show the global distribution of earthquakes.
(2) Show the depth of earthquakes.
The methods for creating this is quite straightforward and can be summarised in the workflow clip below: